Monday, 19 October 2009

THE SELF AND ITS OTHER: ME-POEMS [a collection of 18 private poems]

i) Keighley Streetsii) Do You Like Me?iii) Bending Over Backwardsiv) The Responsev) Big Eyesvi) Take Dvii) Fuckheadviii) The Spewing Tartviiii) Fuck the Other!x) To Be Mexi) The Hell of the Otherxii) Homunculus on the Busxiii) Tonightxiv) The Other Rules, OK?xv) Go Farxvi) I Didn't Make a Move...xvii) The Otherxviii) Me Think It Funny

i) Keighley Streets

Today, I saw a pure Other.Not just any Other.The Other who’d burn me alive, rather than kill me straight.The Other to whom I am shit.The Other to whom I am his Other.And when two Others collide, shit’s let loose. If only in my silly mind.Though everyone’s the Other, pure Others are my true test.I walk on hot shit in their presence.I want to become the Other.But when I don’t, the alternative’s as bad –Either become the OtherOr become dead enough to flit away to my flat-sanctuary.

ii) Do You Like Me?

D, do you like me? Yes? I must be OK then.Chavs, do you like me? Yes! I must be OK then.Working class lad, do you like me? Yes. I must be OK then.Middle class man, do you like me? Yes. I must be OK then…

You don’t like me? iii) Bending Over Backwards

I bend over backwards for A.I bend over backwards for G.I have bent over, and still bend over, for many.I bend over so much I may as well be a bummer-boy.I need to ask: Do others bend over for me?Do they fuck! Never!

iv) The Response

Her response dug deep into my flesh.Sliced off an ego-part from the thin surface.For I had sinned against the Other. This Other.I said what I wanted to say. Not what I should have said.And that was wrong. So wrong.Her response told me, in a hurtful way, that I said something little above shit.I let slip something a little too expressive of my self. And that, in itself, was a sin.My Other was repelled by her own Other.

Whatever traits she displayed, would have shown her to be my Other.And so make me hers.She didn’t humiliate me. No – my own reaction did that.It was Homunculus who was the critical one.He projected his own destructive words into her response.All negativity is Homunculus’s. Therefore my own.

v) Big Eyes

I tried so hard to get it right. To get her right.To know her completely.To know what she liked and disliked.I tried so hard to please her – please her in every way.How did I try? By being her. Or being what I thought she’d like.I tried to be her ideal…or what I thought was her ideal.To become the image of her likes.Expurgating myself by putting on her clothes – the Other’s clothes.

So I stood on eggshells.I watched my every move, to make sure all was it should be.No word expressed my true self.No view, no joke, no mannerism, of my own escaped.Ingratiation works only by being the Other. Or what the Other wants.

Yet all was guess work.I neither knew her ideal, nor in what she consisted.So Homunculus got to work.He guessed at, then created, what she liked in the form of man.He told me what she liked was not-I.And who she was was not-I.

I never thought, not for a second, I should be myself.Myself alone.Yet there is no other self to be.I could have been myself better than I could have been her ideal or likeness.Such attempts to become the Other fail – always fail.And when I do sacrifice myself on the Other’s alter, it brings about pain. Never success.I should still hold tight to myself.And if I bring on violence - then that’s what I bring on.

I must sacrifice my less important self on their supreme Otherness -The Other I should be.The Other I should become.The Other that has the truth on all thingsSimply by virtue of being the Other – being my Other.

So Big Eyes was my Other for the night.Just one more Other among many more.All the same self-controls were turned on - as they are always turned on.

Yet she might have liked me! Was that possible?If I think not, then why do I think not?What sins did I commit that night?Why assume my own depravity?Even if I were wrong to Big Eyes - then I was wrong to Big Eyes.Fancy committing suicide of the self each time the Other rejects me!Why such self-strangulation?Why bind myself in the Other’s thoughts?Why have I died so many small deaths in the Other’s presence?She might have liked me as myself, not as another. Can I even imagine that?Is it a possibility? Why an impossibility?What hells have I gone through to bring this about?Many little hells within which I have been little above shitAnd way below the Other.Way below every Other.

vi) Take D

Take D. His world’s at least two worlds away from my own.Due to the tight relation which holds between us,His world is still part of my own.How is this?I’m affected by a world that’s so unlike my own that it’s hardly a world at all.

I must think his world better.Why think this self-destructive thought?I think his world better, in every way, because it’s another world. That’s all! Simpliciter.That full stop is sudden and abrupt.It has no clauses with which I can qualify its brute reality.Its sense is both atomic and terrible.D’s other world is better than my own.It is the true world - the Real World.That world we hear so much about.The world in which I want to exist, and yet… do I fuck!That very alienation, that distance, from the Other’s worldIs the sole cause of my ills.It is treated as a axiom from which everything bad is deduced.

I don’t think D’s world culpable. I’m not rejecting it for that shit.Even another’s perfect world shouldn’t affect me.My own world should be actualised and made concrete as any other.That will only be brought about by accepting its particularity; its thisness.My world shouldn’t be the circling planet of all the other worlds I’ve orbited and given light.All worlds are autonomous. So my world must be.If not, it’s no true world but a satellite of other worlds.

vii) Fuckhead

Things have got better… but not better enough…He stalked my mind’s periphery with his Other-presence.It mattered to me what a sub-human fucker thought of me – yet another!Why should a nothing matter at all?He has the belly the size of two dead elephants.And the brain of a pub-quiz bore.Yet it mattered. It mattered.

viii) The Spewing Tart

Last night, a tart played me. Played me well.I sucked her scum. She didn’t even suck my dick.What she gave, I took sweetly. You fucking waste of flesh!Live now, not tomorrow. Now! The now is what matters.Not that fictional future I work towards. But never, ever, reach.It’s because of the soothing words that I never get there.And shall never get there… Shall never get there.Have no hope of ever getting there -Until this flat-existence exists outside its tiny selfAnd becomes one with the Other’s world.To be me is a task that should be easy.

viiii) Fuck the Other!

Fuck the Other!Take the Other up its dirty arsehole!Blind the Other.Leave him dead on the roadside.Dead enough to let me be.To be me. To be I. To be my self.To let my self rip at the world the Other rules.To breathe. That’s all. Is that too much to ask? Is it?To be I. Me. Myself. Me. Me. I.One thisness crucified, ever so neatly, on the Other’s sweet ego.To be left alone to be myself.To be masticated in myself.To take all comers right up the arse!Do you understand, for one second, what’s it’s like to be nothing? To be a nobody?Dream it, fucker, dream it well.And then you’ll understand me.

To be myself. That’s all. Is that too much to ask?So what fucking sins am I hiding? Tell me. Where am I going wrong?What the fuck do I need to free myself from this mountain of shit?...In fact, I love its shit-smell comfort.The deeper I am in the shit, the more I feel secure and at home.Do you get that? Do you? Don’t lie to me! Don’t lie to me fucker! …

x) To Be Me

After year after year of self-destruction,I need to sacrifice the feeble bastard I’ve become.To be free.To be unencumbered - free of negative self-views.And that self-destructive cancer that’s eaten my ego away.That is entailment of depression.

Action must be the answer.The desired ends have not come.The means must be action. What else?What else could I have overlooked on those journeys of self-analysis?Action is not a question of truth or of missing knowledge.Experience of doing this or doing that will not be as bad as I imagine.

xi) The Hell of the Other

I’ve been crucified, too many times, on the alter of the Other.People who are tokens of the type I call the Other.I treat myself as little above shit.Yet I've kept myself alive in these Sartrean hellsInhabited by inhibiting Others -And all those unbearable truths he engendersAnd I easily accept.

When in the hallowed presence of the OtherI have believed all this shit, with crazy credulity,Just too many times and for far too long.So it is this flat which insures my survival and sanityIn the long war against the Other's destructive communality.

I have died a thousand small deaths.I have melted, many times, in the Other’s presence.And each time I became nothing - a Heideggerian nothing.One who has the faint sense of still existing, in spite of it all.Of having some kind of affect on some thing or other.I have been nothing to the Other’s many things.I’ve been erased from an existential sumWith myself on the wrong side and the Other, proud on the right side.

Why do I stir, even a ripple, to the feelings of the Other?It’s as if the Other, in all his guises, is a paradigm.Even the value of a Platonic Form.I’ve tried my stupid best to create the purest forms.To make each instantiation good enough to look at with lowly eyes.

One night, I dreamt a sweet dream in which I dared to be.Yet I did so amid the judging eyes of judging others.But that dream wasn’t the sad reality I live.Lived too long in meekness which now seems my essence.

What I now need is not a theory.Not another sequence of ineffectual words.Something that’ll take me beyond the mere knowledge –Mere epistemologies of the self -Into a knowledge that will liberate me from the Other’s chainsAnd those academic words which never take me anywhere.Never make me act on anything.Something which takes me from words to action.

How can I act on my individuality,Rather than contemplate its mere possibilities?What is the answer? Someone, somewhere, tell me.

Who are these perfect beings to whom I sacrifice my lowly self?Take the many who’ve crossed my little egoIn the sure ways of their own individualities.Yet all these Others had a hold over me.The middle class paradigm.The working class paradigm.And those far more particular than that.Those I appease in the sharp knowledge that they’re still fuckers.Why? Because each fucker was a token of that type I named the Other.

Will this rant have an effect in tomorrow’s true light?Why aren’t my indefinite number of words translated into action?Why don’t my arguments touch that domain of actionIn which I want to exist as myself?

xii) Homunculus on the Bus

On the bus, deep amongst the Other, I breathed in deep my individuality.Kept it secure inside, until free of the Other.Off the bus, I breathed all out; the profusion. All the individuality.I breathed easily.

Onboard, the Other’s eyes had penetrated my skull as deeply as any psychiatrist’s.They knew me well.Nothing was hidden…They knew sins I didn’t even know.How is that? What are these dirty stains in my mind’s basement?Those stains the Other spits on and cleans with a broken-glass scourer?But what if there’s no stain of sin?What if there’s been no Fall?

Homunculus has ruled me.It is he, not me, who points out the dirty stains.What if Homunculus invents them in order to busy himself?In order to justify his dirty job?That relentless scrutiny of my mind.Homunculus doesn’t tell me this.He projects his criticisms of me into the Other’s mind.Then the Other recites them with no change.These recitations are word-perfect.Homunculus is happy.If I kill Homunculus, I will kill the Other.When Homunculus dies, so too will the Other.

But let’s get back to hell.Homunculus himself was born of ...He emigrated from his mind into my own,Just as he emigrates now to the Other.Perhaps Homunculus wasn’t born in dadBut in his own mother’s mind.And so on to infirmity.

What it says is what it said to dad.And what it said to dad..And so on and so on…But I am another being.The sin’s stain has been passed on.And that sin is Homunculus’s sin.It is he who should be cast into Hell.Not me.I, instead, live his hell for him.He projects his hell into my mind.Then that hell is projected into the Other.Homunculus never faces his own tribunal.Instead, he hides behind the Other’s words.Those words which have destroyed me.Those words destroy me.

xiii) Tonight

Tonight I won’t act. No. I’ll forget it all…Or remember, but do nothing. Sweet nothing.I’ve never acted. I never act. And never shall.Things, quite inscrutable to me, stop me. Always have.What else could explain this lack?

Why do I care an atom what some fucker thinks?What some Keighley Kelly thinks?And yet I do. I do!Why should sucking scum affect me?One answer always stalks me: I’m yet more scummy than they are.Nothing else explains that absolute lack of effect from the many words.

Let’s get to the core.Why do I care what the Other thinks?Because what they think matters.Oh yes, it matters.I care, with an incredible depth, what the Other thinks.It’s only through the Other I know my own worth.I don’t trust my bad person.The Other gives me the truth about my self.I had the self-trust beat out of me.My ego crushed in such a systematic way it hasn't recovered.

xiv) The Other Rules, OK?

The Other rules me.Rules me with an iron glove with sharp shit on the knuckles.This fist instils its iron law.An unbreakable law. Created by me. For me.I shouldn’t do this. I shouldn’t do that.I shouldn’t do fuck all!

My God, I have so far to go.I’ve haven’t even started the journey to my distant self.Because the true self shrinks, to shrunken-dick-size,When it sees the Other’s big one.A dick so erect I can’t take it.

Fuck the Other!Fuck all Others!That’s the brute fact I need to face - its pure truth.The Other lives because I die.So I must now live as the Other dies. Choose –An existential choice of huge proportions.Decades and still ticking till slow death.Not much living to go now.No more one last time and then a last, last time - till I’m dead and can do fuck all.

It’s my choice. Run with it or die without it.No other way will now do.My time’s nearly up.No more games with words on self-esteem.There’s one way. Only one way.Travel down it, you soft fucker.Do it until something - at least something - happens.Only then will I be alive to the palpitations which stir in my mind.Don’t shrink, fucker-like, anymore!

xv) Go Far

Go far. Go as far as I can go.These are the last times before extinction.Before I’m erased from a picture in which I take no part.There is no last time.Then a dozen final last times.The last time is here with me now.I live it. Or rather I don’t.Take the Foucauldian route.Infect Keighley’s pubs with my putrid sperm.

To live, why so much?Do that's what the Other does.Simply be your own design and no one else’s.The time till death taps and ticks on my skull,As I take the last death-walks to a certain death.Please God, let me be me - even if a fucker.Let me dance my ego upon other egos.You see, Mr Paul, nothing matters unless I let it matter.There is no world to show me the way.Show what I should do.There is only myself left.Take heed Mr M.Pay yourself attention.Don't attend to the Other’s thoughts.

All I’ve got is me.There’s no one else to want or need.Let my self rip. Rip loud on the Other’s ego.Speak to be.Act to be.Dare to be.Words hold me back with their credulous comfort.

xvi) I Didn’t Make a Move

… on Big Eyes. Not even a twitch.I still, like a moron, waited for something to happen.Of course something didn’t happen. How could it?No cause will create no effect.The logic is simple and deadly.I stood there like a dummy.

I'm not an individual.I reflect the Other’s vision of the world.I am parasitic on the Other.I live in his dark shadow or under her big wing.I must never be another’s Other.I can only be the Other or skulk away to nothing.I shall do it again tomorrow.And the day after tomorrow... into infirmity.

xvii) The Other

You sucking scum! You ride on my deflated ego.You eat a bit of me every day I see you.You crucify me on your superior ego.Fuck you! Do you understand the meaning of those words?Do I understand them?Nothing nothing less will do.Then I turn from corpse to person.From life’s terrible ache into the light shining well on the self.

Do it! That’s what they said.Just do it. And nothing less.The fucking Chav; indiscreet to fucking hell.Yes, understand that? Understand that?Take it up deep into your rectal tract, fucker boy.

It’s about time I crucified.Crucified the Other on my alter.Let them bump and grind.So do it, weak boy.You weak, feeble cunt.Do it. For once. Do it.

xviii) Me Think It Funny

Me think it funny. It be funny.Me think it worth saying. Say it.Do float on the Other’s breath.Let yourself rip hard.Fuck the Other’s judgement.The Other knows nothing.Faith in the self. That’s all it takes.Not even faith. It’s truth I lean on, not bullshit.Don’t wait for the Other’s nod.Do it! No matter what.